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levicivita notes ZeroPaid coverage of a recent study by the UK music industry's own economist showing that overall UK music industry revenues were up in 2008 (study, PDF). The study is titled "Adding up the Music Industry for 2008" and it was authored by Will Page, who is the Chief Economist at PRS for Music, a UK-based royalty collecting group for music writers, composers, and publishers. From ZeroPaid: "[T]he music industry is growing increasingly diverse as music fans enjoy a wide range of platforms to hear and consume music. Sales of recorded music fell 6% for example, digital was up 50% while physical dropped 10%, but concert ticket sales grew by 13%. In terms of what consumers spent on music as a whole last year, this surprisingly grew by 3%."

And all those bastards that aren't buying all the songs on an album. Really, just buying what you like and not taking what you don't want is just stealing from hookers and coke dealers. How will they feed their families without the support of the music labels?

The Chief Economist of PRS was found dead in his home, apparently of autoerotic asphyiation, with ropes tied around his neck and completely naked.

The UK police are stumped. "We did find a card with the word 'RIAA' on it, but we decided to ignore it and call this a suicide. A sex game gone wrong." Outsiders call this a case of corporatism - the government and the corporations colluding to cover-up a murder. "It be fascism, that's what it be," said a local man who refused to identity himself.

I like how both the article and the Slashdot submission completely ignore that file-sharing has dropped in the UK [arstechnica.com], especially among teens. Though I know this was posted on Slashdot to give pro-pirates the idea that sales are thriving in spite of piracy, this story doesn't disprove the effect piracy has on sales--if anything, it bolsters the idea that sales go up when piracy goes down.

You're ignoring that there are better content delivery systems these days. Years ago you almost NEEDED to pirate if you wanted a digital copy (especially if you weren't a techie), these days you can buy from many online stores, DRMed or DRM free.

I'd say you're putting the cart before the horse. Piracy has dropped because there's more choice for legal avenues. It's not that pirates have been busted therefore buy more legit downloads.

Not to mention all the people who're finally willing to buy digital media online (legally instead of allofmp3.com or similar sites) because you can get the files in relatively high quality, and without DRM. I can't wait until the first 99ct FLAC store opens...

Slashdot (or at least the segment you are referring to) is not trying to increase piracy, it's trying to reduce copyright, and one of the desired reductions is to make personal file sharing legal. If the artists are doing fine without the draconian laws some people are proposing then it supports the (Slashdot-approved) idea that we do not need those laws.

2) Who paid for the survey? Take a look at http://www.theleadingquestion.com/ [theleadingquestion.com] and you'll find prominent Warner Music Group, EMI, Sony and Universal logos on the front page. Do you trust them to be unbiased?

3) Even if the survey was fair, unbiased and accurate, it cannot distinguish between people who are aware of the RIAA's tactics and are no longer willing to admit to filesharing and people who have actually stopped.

I reckon Spotify is one of the major reasons for the drop in file-sharing of music. On a personal, anecdotal basis, I used to use Limewire A LOT for previewing tracks from artists I'd been recommended. Nowadays, compared with Spotify, filesharing is just too much bloody hard work. If someone's not on Spotify (or YouTube) these days, it's unlikely I'll take the time to find out much about them, and consequently VERY unlikely that I'll actually get round to shelling out for a legit copy.

The RIAA labels are well aware that file sharing is free advertising and it increases sales, the reason they are against it is that it breaks the monopoly on exposure that the RIAA labels had. Being able to try before you buy via P2P allows people to discover great self-promoted and small label music without making expensive 'stab in the dark' purchases. This means that although file-sharers spend on music is higher, the amount that ends up in the pockets of the RIAA labels is lower.

Not to mention the way they're raking internet radio over the coals.
I've probably bought $50-$80 worth of music over the last 2 years that I'd have never heard of without soma.fm's Bootliquor station.

That's a combo of physical CD's, and downloads from both Amazon, and iTunes.

I think you have a decent point in that there is a pro-file-sharing contingent in Slashdot. On the other hand, there are a lot of us who just dislike the bullying tactics of the big record companies, which seem to abuse both the customers and artists that they depend on.

So yes, if piracy is down and sales are up, then it seems reasonable to assume that those two are connected. But what's the cause? Are sales up because piracy is down, and if so, then why is piracy down? Are those RIAA lawsuits with mil

On the other hand, you could argue that a successful anti-piracy campaign has no effect on music sales, since those are still down 6% from the year before. While concert sales have gone up 13%, the bulk of the proceeds from a concert goes to the band, as opposed to recorded music sales where the bulk goes back to the record label.

I've learned to only buy CDs if it's the "greatest hits" album. Although some CDs like Depeche Mode's "Violator" or Janet Jackson's "Rhythm Nation" are good from start-to-finish, they are the rarity not the norm. Most CDs are 1-2 hit songs followed by a bunch of mediocre songs that were never played on the radio because they were poorly-produced.

So for example, rather than buy all 5 of Eminem's or Avril Lavigne's recent CDs, I'll just wait for the greatest hits album. It's ~80% cheaper that way.

I think that your problem here is that you listen to bad music, rather than that CDs follow that pattern.

I have well over 250 CDs, and I enjoy almost all of them from start to finish, and my list grows larger every month. I contend that the problem isn't with music at large, but with your devouring of what the radio shovels into you.

>>>I think that your problem here is that you listen to bad music..... the problem is... your devouring of what the radio shovels into you.>>>

And I think your problem is that you confuse your OPINION with fact. I've tried various types of music that friends recommended to me over the years, like Alternative or Ska or or Rap or Whatever, because they were supposed to be "better" than the pop-radio music I normally listen to. But I found these recommendations largely boring (or noisy).

Well, perhaps if you don't like most songs by your favorite artists, then maybe they're not your favorite artists. Or perhaps they're not worthwhile as musicians. If they can only write one or two good songs every 10 or 15, how could one call them "good" at what they do? If a chef could only make one good meal every 10, no one would call him a good chef, would they? Or a computer company that only manages one good OS every 15.

Now would that be the same people who raised the price when the CD came "to pay off the investment"?When independent economists calculated the price of a CD, on the shelf in the store, being ~10 cents less than the LP. That included paying off investment in 5 years...Or is it the people who said that the prices would drop as soon as the market grew?I am still waiting for the CD market to take off so the prices will drop;-)Or are we talking the guys who manage to set the price of a soundtrack CD higher than the movie DVD?

>>>When independent economists calculated the price of a CD, on the shelf in the store, being ~10 cents less than the LP. That included paying off investment in 5 years...>>>

Yes but even more damning - when the U.S. Federal Trade Commission investigated they discovered that the record companies were colluding to prop-up prices, and threatening discount stores like Walmart, "Sell for $12 and higher, else we'll cut off your supply to all music-related items." The U.S. FTC filed charges of f

No, the cost to produce a record has gone down, not up. Recording equipment has never been cheaper, software can do the job of gear that used to cost a fortune, and CD duplication prices are a fraction of vinyl pressing costs.

You're not paying for a piece of plastic. You're paying for the contents on it. Those contents cost hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars to produce an put on that piece of plastic.

What music costs millions to make? Seriously, there is something very wrong if composer + band + recording studio costs that much. The cost of production has gone down, the Beatles first album was famously recorded in a single day because of the cost of the recording studio. now almost anyone can produce and distribute CDs, my flatmate for a few thousand quid has equipment sound engineers in the 60s would have killed for.Now if you say you're paying for marketing + brand, then yes I understand how those cos

I remember those days in the 1980s, too. At a time when LPs could be easily had for $10-$12, CDs were $18. That's the equivalent of about $34 in today's money. They charged this much because people were willing to pay.

Even as recently as the turn of the centuries, CDs were about $18 -- they hovered around $18 for a good 15 years or so; inflation took care of the cost-downs ($18 in 2000 dollars is roughly $22 in today's money).

Today, most new CDs can be had for about $10 or $12, or about a third of the price

Make no mistake; the live music industry grew in 2008. More events, more bands, more tickets and importantly, higher ticket prices. Breaking it down to basic supply and demand economics, and given the scarcity embedded in its model, the live music industry is somewhere you really want to be right now.

My emphasis.

Perhaps the figures include all the tickets all those suckers bought for the triumphant London return of the "king of pop".

Or maybe this year's new music isn't as boring as last year's (I pretty much gave up buying CDs when I found they were all bland and soporific).

That's quite a report, in its gushing marketingese. I note with delight that "heritage act" has supplanted "senior citizen" as the euphemism for "old age pensioner" or "old geezer".

The money flow is going the way it should. More about the artists and less about the publishers. And at better prices.
To gain recognition, artists aren't required to sign away all their rights to a giant publisher anymore.

Oh wait. Two caveats:
(1) "Sales of recorded music fell 6%" (which means other digital industries that don't involve giving concerts shouldn't expect comparible results).
(2) A recent (July 13, 2009) study of UK piracy says "The analyst firm published a study on Monday that showed the numbers of those who regularly file-shared had dropped by a quarter between December 2007 and January 2009. The trend was particularly pronounced among 14-18-year-olds -- at the earlier date, 42 per cent were file-sharing at least once per month but at the latter date only 26 per cent were doing so."
Source: http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/jul2009/gb20090713_439306.htm [businessweek.com]

http://songza.com/ [songza.com] is a music search engine that indexes YouTube and Imeem. You can search for a specific track, but it's also useful to search for an artist and let it play through a load of their songs (I do this at work sometimes, as I limit myself to legally purchased music on my work PC).

So what you are saying is that in an anonymous survey, you believe those that responded to it lied in the section about downloading, but then were completely honest everywhere else? You can assume the responders were truthful for the entire survey or lied for the entire survey, but it is just silly to assume they were truthful for all of the survey except for the portion you don't agree with. Either the entire thing is legit or throw the whole thing out because you think the results are false, don't try t

I see this as the first indication that we pirates won! I only downloaded music illegally when I did not have a choice, or my choice was so expensive and temporary that it was a smarter move to pirate. Now I don't find myself needing to download music when prices are dropping (on the music I like at least) and I can quickly get a digital album for a decent price, quality, and without DRM. We forced the industry to begin changing and I can't wait to see where it ends up. Hell, there might actually be some de

When you can fit a million people into a concert then you can compare figures. Its good to see artists sweat n work for their millions. Almost anyone can spend a week in front of a modern PC and bang up a reasonably audible production.

That is the rason I believe that the , currently, over privileged artists should get their money mainly from 2 sources:
A) Commercial music usage
B) Live concert ticket sales
And movie "stars" should get to do real work, like acting in a theater. I mean, anyone can whip up a good scene when you have 200 takes, but when you're in a theater, that is the place where you have to really work.

Absolutely music has been a hideous corporate game with big publisher, deciding the
style and message of music, and marketing to the young, for far to long. Any step
away from that has to be a good thing.

Of course. Copyright encourages one thing and one thing only, and that is to find the one hit in a thousand and milk it for all that it is worth.

And for that one hit, talent plays a small quite small role. usually it is just a matter of a combination of doing the right thing at the right time and having the right contacts, and when luck strikes you can leverage it all and become a multi billion dollar business. Ok, that would be software. But it functions in much the same way as the music industry, although

The artist pays production costs on recording sales (inflated costs too, you could build a studio for less than what the studios claim it cost to do the recording). Most artists lose money on record sales as a result, or make very little. Ticket sales are usually 10% of the gross, so even if you play a mostly empty concert you can still expect a check.

"Most artists lose money on record sales as a result, or make very little."

Artists are not asked to contribute their own cash toward the production of a record, so they're not losing money. If an album doesn't sell well, the record company loses money, but the artist breaks even.

You are, however, correct about self-produced albums. If you produce and distribute your own stuff and put the production costs on your VISA card, your bank will still insist on getting paid whether your music makes money or not.

You will not break even, the record company will take it out of your concert/t-shirt money. And its possible for the record company to make money even though the artist loses (or just breaks even) since the payback comes out of the artists cut, not out of the net. (so if the cost is 50k, and they make 1 million in sales at 5% going to the artist, the artist gets nothing and the record company gets 950k).

The record company will not take it out of your concert/t-shirt money unless you've signed away all your revenue streams and/or soul to your label like Robbie Williams did with EMI. Generally when you sign a record deal, your advance will be recoupable (i.e. a loan against your cut of future earnings) and your recording costs may or may not be depending on your leverage and your lawyer.

e.g. Your first record costs Â£$â50k to produce and both it and your 50k advance are recoupable. Your cu

When the RIAA says the recording hasn't broken even, they mean that the artists' relatively paltry portion of the sales profits has not yet added up to the total cost of production and promotion. It does not necessarily mean the label has taken a loss. THEIR portion of the profits has covered the costs several times over.

That's why an album can go multi-platinum, sweep the Grammys, go on every radio station's wear out list and still not result in a check for the band.

Back when I tried Napster, only popular artists has songs listed under their own names. Everyone else was "unknown".

One of the points of copyrights is to ensure credit. Credit does not necessarily mean profit. I would be plenty pissed if my art was circulating around the Internet, everybody liked it, and I had a ton of fans, and... nobody actually knew who I was. Don't even get me started about mis-credited works.

What Napster were YOU using? I could find anything and everything I could think up to search for, and some of my musical tastes are quite remote. I used to be able to bet my co-workers (and win, typically) on attempts to stump Napster. THOSE were the days that had record industry executives spending their nights trembling beneath sweat-drenched sheets.

The industry should be thankful for being able to reach a larger audience without having to pay the giant advertising costs!

The fight against file sharing is the cartel fighting their competetion, the indies. The RIAA labels have radio and don't need P2P. The RIAA isn't interested in keeping Metallica out of your ears, it's interested in stopping the indies from ever being heard.

The RIAA is probably guilty of antitrust violations, but as long as they keep "campaign contribution" bribes going to our corrupt

Well, CD's upper limit is 22khz, vinyl used a 44khz carrier to encode the rear channels of quadrophonic. The closer you get to the 22khz Nyquist limit imposed by CD's 44khz sample rate, the greater the aliasing. A 15khz tone has only three samples per trough, how can you possibly reconstruct a complex waveform with three samples?

Plus, audible frequencies are colored by supersonic waveforms. You don't have them with CD. However, you would have to have a higher sampling rate with your digital master for the v

Not that it adds much, but I recently stole my dad's old record player and have been buying vinyl for about a year. I like the sound quality, I feel somehow "closer" to the music/artist, and the album sleeves make for AWESOME wall decorations. And CDs remind me of the beginning of a terrible age of music. Vinyl reminds me of the end of the best.

The Music Industry is NOT the Recording Industry. As recording has become almost trivially easy, just about any performer who wants to can buy, rent, or borrow a suitable studio, and reproduction has become as simple as copying a file, the industry is becoming more focused on the performer. Which is probably what the fans prefer.

I'm not sure what you mean about "sharing little with the represented artists." Like the US's ASCAP and BMI, they're societies run by and for artists. Their entire mission is to look out for the artists' interests (much like the the RIAA looks after the interests of its members -- the record labels). Performing rights societies take some off the top for administrative purposes, but the bulk is paid out to artists. That's what these societies do -- collect money on behalf of artists.

Interesting statistic. I am all for pushing digital content out to the masses and being able to pick songs you like. I'd much rather buy a couple of songs that I like off an album and not having to fork out the bucks for the rest of the dross. It also creates competitive drive for artists and makes them dig deep into their creative juices or shell out the money for people who know how to produce stuff that sells better (whether of better quality or not).

The problem with that theory is that it would result in attendance dropping, in half empty concerts because there aren't enough people willing to pay the price hike. That isn't what's happening, the venues have been able to raise prices and still get the full house needed for people to come back to the next concert.

The only way that can happen, in a recession yet, is if even more people want to go but can't justify the cost.

So where do all these people find out about the concerts? I don't see any incr

The PRS is the '_Performing_ Rights Society'. As the article says - 'Consumers spent less on recorded music, down 6% since 2007, but concert ticket sales have grown by some 13% as the industry as whole slowly evolves and adapts to digital distribution.'. They collect royalties for performances, not physical sales of CDs, or royalties from downloads, which are collected in the main by the MCPS (Mechanical Copyright Protection Service).
The music industry in terms of the main labels remains slow to adapt, and the ridiculously high percentages charged by download services like iTunes (50% for smaller labels/bands in the UK, plus another 10% to go through a broker if they refuse to deal direct) means that bands are forced to play live as the only sensible source of income.

The guy works for a group whose business is *collecting royalties* for artists. Of course he's going to say that sales are up, and his clients deserve more money. If he were saying that sales were way down and had less than 7 degrees of separation from the RIAA he'd be flayed alive. When his position supports the/. mindhive it doesn't matter what his credentials are.

... who blamed all those previously reported drops in sales on loss of quality will surely attribute this spike similarly: as a rise in quality? Surely they weren't just coming up with excuses to justify their illegal behaviour, right?

Seriously though, this is all a non-issue. It's up to the copyright holder what they do with their works. Whether sharing is beneficial or not, it's still not up to us to dictate to artists how they should market their product. If the statistics say that sales with sharing are

Even if their "mainstay" of physical media continues to tank, this just goes to show that they'll make it up elsewhere. They'll likely continue to increase the price of concert tickets to offset the revenue loss (and to continue the modest increase reported this year), but that will only be sustainable for a limited time. Music remains an overpriced product through most outlets.

I find myself buying a lot of Amazon MP3s when I see album specials for $3 (USD) or less. Sure, I'm not picking up the newest a

The simple reality is: most people who pirate aren't going to buy anyways. It's not a loss if someone downloads your content and tinkers with it 5m and then never touches it again and that is what happens with *a lot* of content. Nor is it a loss if someone downloads your content (because they can't afford it) and likes it and 5 of their friends go out and buy it even though the original person never does.

I still contend that 90% of all illegal downloads comes from people who weren't going to buy the music anyway.
The problem for the music industry is that piracy opens the world up to a larger variety of music. As a result, it's almost impossible for the industry to dictate the music trends. In this modern world it's much harder for the industry to ram "She Bangs, She Bangs!" down our throat.
My cousin was so happy when he got a six record deal ten years ago. Then they promptly shelved him for the duration o

When you buy music, make sure to check http://riaaradar.com/ [riaaradar.com] [riaaradar.com] to see if the album is from a company that funds the RIAA. If they do, don't buy it and stick it to them a couple dollars of lost earnings at a time.

Paging New York County Lawyer. Here's another brick for the wall you're building on how the recording industry lies and lies and lies about all the harm that evil filesharing perverts are causing them.

I'd pay a lot more than $20 for something like that. All you can eat music without DRM? In high quality, properly tagged and with high-res album art? I'd live off Ramen if I had to in order to pay for that, and gladly!

The reason that the big record labels perpetuate the myth that new artists need to be 'funded' is so they can perpetuate the closed ecosystem where artists can't reach the public without signing away 90 to 100% of the profits to them. This is the real reason why the music industry are willing to make payola payments to distribute songs for free on the radio, but are fighting against the free advertising of their product by filesharing, although both forms of advertising generate sales - it's because they can monopolise the airwaves but they can't do the same with P2P. It's all about artificial barriers to entering the market.

Apple don't lose money on iTunes, they make a HUGE profit. They take 29 cents per 99 cent song, and have sold over 6 billion songs, do the math!

Not much variety in music? Go count the number of artists on iTunes, Mr Troll.

Your words belie the facts, but if your industry is dying it's dying because nobody needs it any more. Thirty and more years ago it cost a fortune to record an album, now it's dirt cheap. My musician friends rent studio time and produce their own CDs, profesionally duplicated and packaged at an affordable price, and they sell them for five to ten bucks a pop and make a tidy profit on them.

Do you feel sorry for the buggy whip manufacturers? You should find another line of work, like they did. Like them, like

I'm told it's virtually impossible to make money running a small venue or festival.

You don't get rich, but you make enough to make it worthwhile. That's why we keep seeing more and more festivals popping up. Personally, I think that's a good thing. I'd rather go to half a dozen cheap small festivals a year than one huge expensive fest like Bonnaroo. As long as the staff and musicians get paid, and the organizer gets enough to make it worth doing again, it's a success.